Nicholas Tanek interviewed me for the Your Kinky Friends video stream/podcast, where I got to talk about A Lover’s Pinch, BDSM history, and my personal journey through the kink world. There are a lot of other interesting interviews and essays, including a series on the heroes of the kink community. There’s even a video chat with Susan Wright of NCSF.

One of the first academics to study the San Francisco gay leather culture, Gayle Rubin, gave a two-part interview at the San Francisco Leathermen’s Discussion Group back in 2012. In particular, she references her classic essays “Elegy for The Valley of the Kings” and “Thinking Sex”.

…Lush, the high street retailer of bath bombs etc, ran a campaign in many of their shop windows involving people in cages or dressed as animals to highlight animal testing of cosmetics. In their Regent Street shop they put on a performance lasting several hours in which a body-stocking naked actress was tortured by a man in a white coat. Not surprisingly, the coverage of this got some BDSM attention.

iHarem is a blog with a vast collection of images and especially video clips of harem/slave girl/odalisque Orientalist fantasies, some going back to the early Silent Film era. Apparently, as long as there has been moving images, they have been used to deliver Orientalist fantasies of beautiful, available women, often in quantity.

LN pointed me at this fascinating interview, courtesy of the Leatherati Youtube channel, with slave Alia who is a devout Muslim woman who is also the slave of Master Skip Chasey. She comes from a cultural background quite different from most people in the greater BDSM world, and there are interesting parallels between her life as a devout Mulsim woman and her life as a slave.

As I’ve mentioned before, I’m interested in exploring the world of fetishes, even if they don’t have any personal appeal to me. I recently came across OPandER.com, which has a Clips4Sale store.

OP and ER clips are little dramas of jeopardy and salvation. Women get in situations in which they need medical treatment, and there’s a strong emphasis on the medical technologies and on the physical signs of the female’s experience. “Excellent acting with a dramatic breathless scene and seizure, very deep and strong chest compressions, realistic defibrillations, intubation, 12 lead ECG.” “A Nice Surgery Feature film with detailed surgery scene, black rubber mask, CPR, defib, many closeups.” Some of the scenes are apparently shot in a real hospital.

On the most superficial level, this is a way of seeing women naked. Slightly deeper, this is a way of putting women in positions of intense vulnerability and dependence. Digging in even deeper, what’s unique about this fetish scenario is that the “violence” done to the woman (defibbing, intubation, CPR, etc.) is not to hurt or punish her, but to save her. There’s a built-in excuse for getting the fantasizer off the hook for sexual guilt and anxiety.